Graham Kerr still Galloping Gourmet

Wednesday

May 2, 2018 at 3:00 AMMay 4, 2018 at 4:23 PM

The dish is also a way to chart the remarkable life of Kerr, who began as an energetic TV pioneer with a love of clarified butter on "The Galloping Gourmet," swung dramatically toward health food following tragedy and now embraces a middle path embracing nourishment and delight.

Mark KennedyAssociated Press

Graham Kerr is having a group of guests over to his home so he's decided to whip up a batch of his Farmhouse Vegetable Soup.

It calls for a blended medley of carrots, onions, garlic, parsnips, sweet potato and onion. The recipe is from his groundbreaking "The Graham Kerr Cookbook" and it's tried-and-true – he's been making it for more than 50 years, for royalty and commoner alike.

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The dish is also a way to chart the remarkable life of Kerr, who began as an energetic TV pioneer with a love of clarified butter on "The Galloping Gourmet," swung dramatically toward health food following tragedy and now embraces a middle path embracing nourishment and delight.

"It's a thick soup which I used to make with cream," he says. "I now take out some of the vegetables, whizz them up in a blender with some evaporated skim milk, and pour that back in in the place of cream. I find it just as unctuous."

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That his soup has endured from late-'60s ham and hedonism to today's Pilates and probiotics is a testament to the strong architecture of the recipe. That strength has prompted publisher Rizzoli to republish Kerr's 52-year-old cookbook this spring.

"This book is close to my heart because it's a method of cooking which is good. You only need to change the ingredients and the weight of some of them and it works just as well today as it did 52 years ago," Kerr said by phone from his home in Washington state.

The book came out in 1966, several years before Kerr first leapt over a chair on "The Galloping Gourmet." Some of the ingredients have not aged well – toheroa, a green clam from New Zealand, is almost extinct – but Kerr's clear and concise methods for everything from carving chicken to poaching fish are timeless. He included three different measurements for every recipe – grams, ounces and cups.

He taught basic preparations for things like sauces and meats and then offered readers ways of building on them. The reissue includes new archive photos — including remarkably small-looking chickens by our standards today – and charming handwritten commentary from Kerr.

Cookbook authors Matt and Ted Lee are behind the push to reissue forgotten culinary gems and they were stunned to find so much still relevant in "The Graham Kerr Cookbook."

"He's really expressing a very enlightened way about food, the likes of which American culture wouldn't see expressed in popular culture for 40 years," Matt Lee said, citing Kerr's embrace of using meats nose-to-tail, his thriftiness and attentiveness to food waste by using the whole vegetable.

Lee also credited Kerr's book – along with Julia Child and James Beard – with empowering home chefs at a time when the culinary world was cloistered. "This was to empower you to take these techniques to whatever protein or vegetable that you may encounter," he said. Kerr even went further– he encouraged readers not to obey his recipes to the letter.

Kerr, 84, was born in London to a hotel manager father. He grew up living on the property and eating meals in the restaurant before the customers arrived. He was trained in the French culinary traditions at college and briefly became manager of the Royal Ascot Hotel in London.

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In 1958, Kerr moved to New Zealand, where he was named chief catering adviser for the Royal New Zealand Air Force. His break into television occurred two years later – courtesy of an injury.

The Air Force was going to film a live TV segment with a physical education instructor but he sprained his ankle. Kerr was ordered – "I said no and they said 'This is an order,'" he recalls – to do something on-air. So he did something basic. He cooked eggs.

That eventually led him to gallop: Kerr and his producer wife, Treena, moved to Canada and created a cooking show that showed off Kerr's charisma and humor on "The Galloping Gourmet," which ran from 1969-71 and reached 200 million viewers around the world each week.

On the show, Kerr would cook in a suit coat, tie and a colorful shirt or a tuxedo, mixing "Monty Python"-esque humor with a generous helping of innuendo and a splash of video clips of exciting food places around the world.

The tall and handsome chef was liberal with glugs of sherry and his use of egg whites. His dishes often boiled over or he spilled ingredients and he invited audience members up to cook with him. His humor got him an invitation to "The Tonight Show" with Johnny Carson in 1970.

A car crash in 1971 left Kerr and his wife badly injured. While they recuperated, the family sailed the world. When Treena suffered a heart attack in 1986, her husband reformed his culinary ways and tried to wring as much fat, salt and sugar out of his recipes as possible.

"I did go through a phase in my life when everything started with 'b' – it was brown rice and bulgur and barley – and it really tasted like the backside of the moon, whatever that must taste like," he said.

"My son, who was 12 at the time, said, 'Dad, I'm 12 years old and I don't expect to get cancer of the bowels so would you please find something else?' I finally came to the conclusion that things must be delightful."

These days he loves local cheese and vegetables, lamb loin and makes porridge with local fruit, nonfat Greek yogurt, skim milk – and a splash of hazelnut creamer ("I would never tell anyone except you," he says, conspiratorially.) Now a widower, he loves to share his culinary skills with friends and strangers alike.

"I have had a life of being filled with joy. And, OK, the ingredients have changed, that doesn't really matter," he said. "It's the end result of nourishing someone and giving them a delightful experience and laughter at the same time."

Farmhouse Vegetable Soup

2 medium carrots

½ small Kumera or turnip

1 small parsnip

I medium onion

4 tablespoons clarified butter

1 clove garlic

1 ¾ cup stock

½ cup cream

Salt, to season

9 black peppercorns

3 bay leaves

4 parsley stalks

3 lemon thyme sprigs

COMMENTS ON METHOD

Surprising as it may seem, we had a farmhouse vegetable soup on the menu at the fashionable Royal Ascot Hotel. As a soup it was the best seller, beating real turtle and royal game. This basic method is the recipe we used. The kumera is a Maori vegetable grown in New Zealand – a type of sweet potato.

METHOD OF PREPARATION

Peel chilled vegetables or, if good skins, then just wash well and slice. Measure out stock and cream. Tie herbs together.

Add to your sliced vegetables a collection of vegetable peelings saved from the day or meal before. Keep them in a plastic bag in the refrigerator.

Melt the clarified butter in a frying pan; add the chilled sliced vegetables and cook gently for 4 minutes.